Switzerland Honours the Greats
The Swiss Music Prizes are a collection of fifthteen awards handed out each year by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture to celebrate the achievements of artists and composers from all corners of the Swiss music world.
This year’s winner of the Swiss Grand Award for Music, the highest official accolade a musician can receive in Switzerland, is Stephan Eicher. Born and raised near Bern, Eicher, in the late 1970s, attended the alternative art and craft school F&F in Zurich where he became part of the nascent punk scene with his synth-punk band Noise Boys. With his next musical venture, the band Grauzone and their timeless song “Eisbär”, he laid the foundation of an extraordinary career as a singer/songwriter equally adept at writing lyrics in German, Swiss German, French, English and Italian. All of these, of course, require a very different melodic and rhythmic approach. Combining influences as disparate as Patti Smith, Georges Brassens, and Johnny Cash, he is a major star, particularly in France. Always ready for an experiment, he has recorded albums with literary texts by his friend, the author Philippe Dijan, and Martin Suter
Amongst the fourteen Swiss Music Prizes winners, five acts are of special interest to us here at Swiss Music Export, Yilian Cañizares, Tom Gabriel Fischer, Louis Jucker, Roli Mosimann, and Manuel Troller.
Aged fourteen, Cuban-born violinist, singer and composer Yilian Cañizares won a scholarship to study the violin in Caracas. She completed her studies in Switzerland where she has lived ever since. Her Ensemble Ochumare comprises members from Venezuela, Cuba, and Switzerland and combines a “Creole groove” with improvisation and vocals in French, Spanish and Yoruba.
With the radically idiosyncratic Celtic Frost, Tom Gabriel Fischer broke down a host of stylistic barriers to influence countless hard, and harder, heavy metal bands, including the Foo Fighters, Nine Inch Nails, and Marilyn Manson. Never following the path of least resistance to achieve commercial success, he continues to be a trailblazer with his doom-metal band Triptykon.
Louis Jucker from La Chaux-de-Fonds in the Jura has appeared in these pages innumerable times. As a member of the noisy math-core band Coilguns, the ex-architect has toured Europe’s more radical rock clubs, and yet, give him an acoustic guitar, and he turns into a quietly powerful singer/songwriter of remarkable skill. He also runs a record label, Hummus Records, a tool to release the music of his many creative friends.
Moving to New York in the early 1980, Roli Mosimann began to explore the intricacies of studio technology during his time as a drummer for the band, Swans. Producing albums for The The, The Young Gods, Celtic Frost, New Order, among many others, he most recently worked with Fredy Studer’s Phall Fatale.
Guitarist Manuel Troller is best known for his work with the band, Schnellertollermeier. He has taken part in a wide range of projects, from psychedelic rock to minimal music and improvisation. In 2019, he was the curator of the Zurich Taktlos Festival.
The other winners of the Swiss Music Prizes 2021 are percussionist, composer and curator Alexandre Babel, interpreter of baroque music Chiara Banchini, ambassador for the accordion Viviane Chassot, composer of quiet Jürg Frey, jazz drummers Lionel Friedli, yodel rebel Christine Lauterburg, musical alchemist Roland Moser, archeologist of sound Conrad Steinmann, and jazz trombonist Nils Wogram.
Backed by the Swiss government’s arts department, the Swiss Music Prizes are a reward for sizeable body of innovative – though not necessarily commercially successful – work. Choosing from an extensive long-list of nominations, a jury of seven experts picks fourteen artists to be awarded CHF 25’000 each as well as one overall winner who will receive CHF 100’000. Laurence Desarzens, incidentally, the Swiss Music Export president, is the chairwoman of the jury!
The award ceremony takes place on 17 September 2021 at LAC Lugano.
Swiss Music Prizes
Swiss Federal Office of Culture
